What is it about power?

Diogenes was ruminating recently on oft-heard and familiar quotations, when I heard him murmur, "Acton missed a couple of steps." Upon my query as to which steps, he replied that when Lord Acton wrote "Power tends to corrupt" he was correct, but that corruption was not the first side effect of holding power. Dio maintains that power, like many things that carry a certain glamour of temptation, proceeds stepwise to corruption.

Society tends to break processes into parts, the better to define certain stages. While such an approach is arbitrary, subjective and far from universal, it does allow for easier comprehension by the general public. So we have many Twelve Step programs cloned from AA; the five stages of grief; and the stages of addiction.

Dio believes that power is an addictive thing, and he sees distinct parallels between the stages of addiction: Experimentation, Social use, Problem use and Dependency, and the stages of corruption: Fascination, Testing limits, Incipient corruption and Absolute corruption.

Of course this brings us to the Great Pretender. We need first to point out that he clearly has an addictive personality. According to the Federal Election Commission, Trump owns at least 515 entities. The number includes holding companies, real estate organizations, and other businesses whose reach extends deeply into world commerce. In short, Trump is addicted to acquisition, and there seems no limit to his need to acquire ever more property and influence.

So what about acquiring power--and by power Diogenes means the ability to apply force as a means of achieving political change. During the campaign Trump frequently spoke of his support and approval of the military and of police forces--organizations with the power to use force. He exerted his own power by expelling hecklers and dissidents from his rallies, and by urging his supporters to physically confront protesters. Diogenes thinks this behavior is indicative of the first stage of power corruption: Fascination with the notion of using force.

He leaped into the second stage, testing the limits of his authority to use power, on April 6, by striking Syria with missiles. and following up a week later by dropping the most powerful non-nuclear bomb in the US arsenal on a cave complex used by ISIS in Afghanistan. Both attacks are justifiable, but they raise the troubling question of Trump's self-control: Will he be able to stop these attacks and let statecraft and other nonviolent means follow up, or will his ego and his drive to overwhelm everything in his path lead to a continuous escalation? He has been indulging in sabre-rattling and trash talk aimed at some of the most dangerously unpredictable people in the world, such as Kim Jong-un. Given his own tendency to instability and unpredictability, and his need to dominate, Trump with weapons is a very dangerous creature. Is he corrupt in his use of power? Maybe not yet, but he's heading that way rapidly.

And let's consider the complete quote about power corrupting: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."

--Richard Brown